Future tense

Sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Fifty Degrees Below, is set in a flood-ridden America facing the consequences of global warming. Sarah Crown talks to him about climate change, the power of science and the trials of living under 'the worst president in American history'

Kim Stanley Robinson: 'It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think people are so stupid as to kill themselves off'.

Future tense

Sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Fifty Degrees Below, is set in a flood-ridden America facing the consequences of global warming. Sarah Crown talks to him about climate change, the power of science and the trials of living under 'the worst president in American history'

In the wake of a tropical storm, a low-lying American city is drowning. Buildings are demolished and bridges knocked out; tens of thousands of people are without electricity or fresh water; hospitals are bursting at the seams with the sick and the dead.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. But this isn't a retelling of the last few weeks' events in the United States, it is the opening of Fifty Degrees Below, the second volume in science fiction maven Kim Stanley Robinson's latest trilogy on climate change. And the drowned city isn't New Orleans: it's Washington DC.

Set in an America of the almost-now, Fifty Degrees Below (and the first volume of the trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain) tells the story of the efforts of a loosely-connected group of scientists, campaigners and politicians to provoke a national response to the crisis of global warming. Unfortunately for them, as environmental aide Charlie Quibbler observes, it's "easier to destroy the world than to change capitalism even one little bit". It is not until the combination of two colliding storm systems and an unprecedented tidal surge causes Washington's Potomac river to bursts its banks and overwhelm the country's capital at the climax of book one that the world sits up and takes notice. But, by this point, the polar ice caps have already begun to melt in earnest, shutting down the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and creating environmental conditions that could usher in a new ice age. The last ice age, 11,000 years ago, took just three years to start.

These disturbingly convincing, exceptionally well-realised novels are the latest works from one of the undisputed leaders of the field in contemporary science fiction. Justly famous for his epic, award-winning trilogy on the colonisation of Mars, Robinson's brand of imaginative but grounded sci-fi, combined with his gift for riveting narrative, fine evocation of place and flair for acute personal and social observation, has brought him many devotees, from within the genre and beyond. The topical subject matter of his latest novel, particularly in light of its disturbingly prescient depiction of a US under siege from the weather, will no doubt bring him many more.

I phone Kim Stanley Robinson - Stan - at his home in California to talk about his latest novel, at the end of my day and the beginning of his. He sounds every inch the laidback Californian - charming, relaxed, more than happy to chat away about the trilogy and the ideas and political circumstances that gave rise to it. "I read years ago about the possibility of global warming leading to the West Antarctic ice sheet detaching, and the level of water displacement that would entail," he explains. "And I started thinking, well, what would we do? Would it be possible to do anything? And at that point you get into terraforming, and science fiction ... "

The concept of terraforming - transforming the landscape of a planet to acquire the characteristics of Earth - is central to Robinson's Mars trilogy, in which the characters attempt to effect climate change on a massive scale to warm the planet to habitable levels. In his latest books, Robinson turns this concept on its head: rather than shaping an alien landscape until it resembles Earth, he explores the possibility of manipulating our own environment to redress the damage we've done to it. But what seemed relatively straightforward on Mars's vast, uncomplicated canvas is infinitely trickier on a planet that already supports a complex, populous biosphere. Every proposed action (adding salt to the ocean to restart the Gulf Stream, shooting dust into the atmosphere to reflect light and heat back into space) is likely to produce not one but many reactions, most of them entirely unexpected, in what one ecologist in Fifty Degrees Below calls "the law of unintended consequences". The challenge in this trilogy - to which Robinson gleefully rises - is to work out how to operate within the constraints of a land already lived in.

"It seems so easy on Mars, and looks so hard on earth, which is kind of ironic," Robinson agrees. "It's infinitely more difficult when there's already an established ecology. There's no room for error. And also, alas, there are some mistakes that we simply don't have the power to correct."

Such as?

"Reducing the acidity of the ocean. That's a problem I've become more aware of since I finished book two - it will definitely feature in the third volume. Much of the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere actually ends up in the ocean, increasing its acidity and making it harder for the little creatures to live. They represent the bottom of the food chain and we're at the top of it. Scientists have looked at whether we could de-acidify the oceans after the fact, and the answer is flatly no ...

"But there are things we can do. The kind of terraforming projects we may well have to contemplate in the future are huge, but they're not outside civilisation's industrial ability."

This fundamental belief in the power of science to tip the scales in our favour underpins Robinson's writing, to the extent that, although he is predicting a future in which we will either plunge into an ice age or drown beneath a 7m-tall wave, his tone frequently verges on the upbeat, and his characters refuse to succumb to despair and instead view the world's potentially fatal problems as challenges to be met. But how much faith can we honestly put in humanity's ability to solve the problems it has created? How does Robinson respond to Martin Rees's chilling claim in his recent book, Our Final Century, that we have a 50/50 chance of making it to the end of the century?

"My sense of it," Robinson replies after a meditative pause, "is that the odds are better than that. It's likely that we'll cause a small mass extinction, but I believe that ultimately reason will prevail. If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off."

Ah, the US. Robinson is of course an American himself, and apart from the odd nod to the wider world, his books are set in and deal exclusively with America. As evidence for human-triggered climate change has mounted over the past decade, the US's continued policy of wilful ignorance has earned it considerable disapprobation from the international community. To what extent, I ask him, does he hold his country to blame for current levels of global warming?

"I think the US is in a terrible state of denial," he says firmly. "Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. Even here in California, 50% of cars on the freeway are SUVs, and they're political statements: they say, we're going to take the rest of the world down with us because we don't give a damn. Essentially they're Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush. I do think the world has larger global warming problems, but if the US were actually engaged in dealing with them, there'd be a sense that the worst abuser had seen the light and the whole world was on the same page. There's a really sizeable minority here who back measures to reduce emissions, but the political process is controlled by the Republican administration, which is basically in thrall to the oil industry. So it'll come down to another election - and with the last two elections both in their different ways perhaps having been stolen, we can't even really count on democracy anymore. It's pretty scary here."

Robinson makes his disillusionment with the electoral process clear in Fifty Degrees Below, when he moves beyond speculating about whether earlier elections have been fudged to postulating the existence of computer programs capable of deliberately fixing results. A number of striking parallels between Robinson's Republican president (who, following the flooding of Washington, declares the country to be at "a state of war with nature") and the US's present incumbent led me to wonder to what extent the trilogy was intended as a satire on the current political situation there.

"Well, there is a bit of that," he admits, "but it's very hard to be funny about this stuff, except in the blackest sense. If people were to mess around with elections nowadays, you'd never know - with the disappearance of the paper trail in 2000, we've been thrown into a world of surreal semi-democracy. You just can't be sure anymore. I thought it had to be talked about.

"And in terms of the president, there are similarities, but I wanted mine to be much nicer. The current guy is worthless, probably the worst president in American history. There's a sort of stupid, small-minded meanness - a pathological assholery - to him. I think he likes doing bad things. And I think a fair amount of his base approves of that resentment - against the idea of progress, against the future, against the rest of the world ...

"It's heads-down time over here. Now we're in it, and it's a godawful point in history, but I cross my fingers for an honest election in 2008. There is a lot of awareness in the States of the severity of the situation, and maybe this hurricane will foreground it again - another obvious sign that there's a problem. On we go."

With barely a day going by without another gloomy global warming story making the headlines, it is difficult to know what it will take for the current US administration to wake up to the dangers of climate change - or to predict what effects our abuse of the planet will have on us, or our children. With the final volume of his trilogy due out at the end of next year, Robinson now faces the task of doing just that: projecting how climate change will play out across the globe in years to come. Any hints about how it will go?

"Well," he says, with a return to his earlier optimism, "I want things to turn out well - a comedy as opposed to a tragedy. I want it to end with marriage and children."